I noticed this problem with the GPU3 setup...and I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed the same.

I do folding on Slackware systems. Don't use any other Linux distro. I've been successful using the 64bit versions from 13.0 and beyond. These have the 32-bit Multilib setups as created by Alien Bob, one of the Slackware developers, along with his 32bit Wine builds....and it's working as expected.

What I've noticed is that when I setup a system to use the GPU3 wrapper version, that the FAH process ends up consuming an ENTIRE core on the PC. That means that a quad core only had three cores left to do other work with. A dual core has one left for other work.

I noticed this, since I run boinc (for WGC) on the CPU's, and run FAH on the GPU's.

While running the GPU3 wrapper with wine, the FOUR boinc tasks only use a total of 300% of a quad core. This leaves the FAH core with about 60-80% of IDLE time. I've been able to monitor this using 'top,' then hit '1' to show the specific percentages for each CPU core.

I thought it was a fluke.... some kernel misconfiguration, but through changing each part of the config...I have to pin it down to using the GPU2 wrapper with the cuda 2.3 toolkit that lets the entire CPU to be used. As soon as I switch up to the 3.0 cuda toolkit, I loose an entire core. I'm using different versions of wine (1.1.x, 1.4.x, and 1.5.x) and changing wine versions does not make any difference.

I even tried the 3.1 and 3.2 cuda toolkits just to see if that may make a difference. NO. Entire core lost to FAH. Idle percentages in the 60-80 range for the FAH core.

As soon as I backed the wrapper and toolkit to the 2.3 level...my CPU shows very little idle time. This is the only way I can get all of my CPU cores to operate near 100%.

I even tried different FAH client versions. 6.23, 6.30, and 6.41. No difference. They all run FahCore_11.exe.

May this have to do with the SLEEPWAIT variable within the GPU3 wrapper? I've tried to manipulate it, but it had no effect.

Could this be a problem (bug) in the cuda toolkit? I would believe that something is wrong there. I can't see how the wrapper dll could cause this kind of execution/scheduling oddity.

larryb63 wrote:Gang, I noticed this problem with the GPU3 setup...and I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed the same.

I do folding on Slackware systems. Don't use any other Linux distro. I've been successful using the 64bit versions from 13.0 and beyond. These have the 32-bit Multilib setups as created by Alien Bob, one of the Slackware developers, along with his 32bit Wine builds....and it's working as expected.

What I've noticed is that when I setup a system to use the GPU3 wrapper version, that the FAH process ends up consuming an ENTIRE core on the PC. That means that a quad core only had three cores left to do other work with. A dual core has one left for other work.

Can folks out there take a look at your 'top' numbers, and see if the 3.0 wrapper is causing the same level of idle time on the FAH core?

I found that the 'nice' was slowing down the Fermi GTX 460 to about a 9:00 TPF, which is terrible. Without the 'nice', the TPF drops to the 'normal' 3:45 for the P8073 WUs, on a stock-clock (675MHz) GTX 460.

I determined when I first started doing GPU/Wine folding, that using 'nice' wasn't very nice in terms of ppd, so I run them all at normal priority. When I was testing this issue, I tried using nice again, and the TPF was going in the toilet, and PPD was still suffering. It would not change the CPU idle time, though.